Fishing the Valentino Pier and beyond with Bob Aquatic

I have a confession: I cannot wake up before sunrise. So when I ask Bob Blankemeier (known online as Bob Aquatic) what time I should meet him at Valentino Pier for a morning of fishing the East River’s brackish water, and I’m not met with a concrete time, but rather the cool idea of early hour (“sunrise”), my stomach sinks a little.

I hold up my end of the bargain, rise before the sun, wrestle my packable fishing rod into two neat pieces and pack a smattering of plastic worms, hoping this would be perceived like a partygoer’s offering, the equivalent of bringing wine to a birthday. I arrive to find Bob’s bait of choice already tucked into a painter’s pail on ice—dozens of fresh shrimp from his local seafood market. 

Bob regularly archives himself fishing throughout NYC on his Youtube channel, filmed with his GoPro and narrated with the easy cadence of a fisherman who doesn’t take himself too seriously. At 39, Bob’s been fishing for many years, but leaned into creating fishing videos and began his dedicated channel in 2020 when his work in the film industry slowed down.

Bob has two fishing poles resting against the railing with their lines cast into the water when I meet him at the end of Valentino Pier. He hasn’t caught anything yet today, but in past seasons he’s caught porgies, fluke, tautog, American eel, errant tropical reef fish, and the highly sought-after striped bass, whose resident variety seems to find many places to thrive around the Red Hook waterfront.

“Striped bass are structure-oriented fish. They like rocks or bridge pilings or really anything that they can use to have advantage over prey. They’re super lazy fish, but in an efficient way. They won’t exert energy unless they have to, and once you can understand the feeding window that the stripers are on, you can replicate it.”

“I tried going out for striper for a year or so [in 2012] and couldn’t catch any. I was going to the Rockaways a lot. I would go out to Coney Island. I’d ride my bike out there and couldn’t really understand it. Then I went out with [a fisherman] and he took me over there,” he says, pointing to the jutting heaps of concrete bricks near the pier. “He showed me a couple spots in the construction sites where there were striped bass and I was blown away.” 

Bob tells me that the East River is awesome because anybody can come out and fish it. Beyond being extremely accessible, today we are gifted with a stubby, rectangular rainbow that disappears and reappears for hours beside Lady Liberty, and despite zero bites, I’m convinced it’s a good omen.

Discussing the recent news that the Hudson River is now clean enough to eat fish from (in moderation), Bob describes the food chain—bass consume mussels, clams, and the resident tautog. This is part of the reason he’s so passionate about the work that the Billion Oyster Project is undertaking as an effort to create a cleaner New York Harbor by restoring oyster reefs across the five boroughs. Their reef restorations provide habitat for countless species, filter pollutants from the water, and help prevent erosion along the shorelines. Bob looks forward to the day that oysters aren’t pulling up such heavy pollutants, which will mean the fish aren’t consuming as many, either.

“In the past twelve years, it has without a doubt, cleaned up. To be able to go out to the Rockaways and see a thresher shark breach or a whale—I’ve seen whales from, like, here to that,” Bob says as he points to the not-too-far horizon. “It’s only going to get better over the years, and if they continue to clean it up, New York City fishing has the potential to be world-class. If things are properly managed and bass start showing up and repopulating and spawning properly again, it could be so good.”

The rainbow is still hanging in the distance when my thoughts turn from skill or the cleanliness of the water, to the infamous power of a fisherman’s superstition.

“I didn’t eat a banana today,” I reassure him, knowing the tradition of the fruit bringing bad luck to a day of fishing. We are quickly approaching four hours of casting and we might need to call on superstition for an environmental edge.

“You know, sometimes if it’s dirty, I’ll spend a couple minutes picking up the pier,” Bob says of his own fishing ritual. “Like, a dog could step on this … or a bird could get wrapped up in this,” he says as he picks up a loose hook and a wad of fishing line from the ground. “Then I’ll start catching fish.”

Alas, the ritual doesn’t favor us today, so we meet again a few weeks later—this time farther up the East River at Pier 5. A few things are similar to the pier at Valentino: Lady Liberty is still in sight and, like before, it’s more or less just Bob out fishing today. The water is several degrees warmer than it was last time and, thankfully, it’s past noon. 

It’s obvious how much of an impact Bob has on local fishing communities in NYC. He recently did a fishing pop-up in East River Park and clearly enjoys the camaraderie that fishing brings. As I stroll up today, Bob is chatting with a guy that knows him from his Youtube channel. 

“… And the conversations, like, what we’re doing right now,” he tells me, “I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people over the years tell me about their lives. It’s so cool. I love that part.”

Then, finally, like magic, even without the glory of the squat rainbow in the distance, the long-awaited moment arrives. Somewhere between watching the cargo ships float by and the occasional lonely mallard weave overhead, we catch a fish.

It’s a five-inch, palm-sized bergall, and over the course of the afternoon, Bob reels more of them in one at a time, with a sort of reverse Russian nesting doll effect—the fish slowly becoming bigger and bigger with each successful snag.

“This one is a female,” Bob tells me, gesturing towards her belly full of eggs. “I’m really glad we’re catching these,” he says. “They’re such a New York fish.”

There’s no indication that Bob is desperately hoping for a bigger prize, a rarer variety, or something more impressive. Bob seems happy simply to be fishing. When asked about trophy fishing—the anglers out for the mighty, glorious catch—he responded quickly.

“I had that mentality for a long time, and then when you give up the ego, it feels so good. You lose a fish, you don’t care. You don’t catch something that day, it doesn’t matter. I think that takes a while. And probably, to be real with you…,” Bob says with a smile, his bike leaning lazily with the weight of fishing gear and his two poles patiently waiting for a bite, “it probably takes catching a bunch of really nice fish.”